Baking a Big Apple delight

Page Tools

Mark Kurlansky says writing is akin to baking: you think
everything is related to it. And pastries are crucial to his first
novel, he tells John Freeman in New York.

Although his best-selling books Cod: A Biography of the Fish
that Changed the World and Salt: A World History have
earned him a reputation as a world-class foodie, Mark Kurlansky may
first and foremost be a connoisseur of neighbourhoods.

"I lived in a number of places as they changed," says the
bearded, sleepy-eyed writer, tucking in to a very large plate of
lox and eggs at the 2nd Avenue Deli. There was the time he watched
the 6th arondissement go posh in about two years, or when he lived
on Miami Beach in the '80s. "I had the whole strip to myself back
then," says Kurlansky.

One of the most dramatic shifts Kurlansky witnessed, however,
was not in Paris or South Beach or even the Caribbean, where he
covered Haiti in the '80s as a journalist, but in New York's East
Village, where we are now eating. Once a thriving Jewish community
sprinkled with Latin elements, the area is now home to a bustling
faux-bohemian population, who enjoy their Starbucks and can afford
the $US2500 ($3300)-a-month rents for former tenement flats. "I
first had a rent-stabilised apartment around here that was $67 a
month," Kurlansky says with a laugh.

Whereas Kurlansky always funnelled such observations into
non-fiction in the past - such as in his most recent book,
1968 - he has now poured them into a novel, Boogaloo
on 2nd Avenue, an homage to the East Village, before the smart
set had entirely taken over and driven out the squalor folks came
for in the first place.

Our guide to this unique slice of New York history is Nathan
Seltzer, a comically high-strung, claustrophobic copy-shop owner
who is heir to his parents' worthless real-estate holdings. The
book opens in 1988 at the peak of the Wall Street boom. While
Nathan dithers over whether to sell his shop to an investor for
$500,000, his father Harry bicycles the neighbourhood, taking care
of people, including a junkie prostitute.

Though he did not live in New York in the late '80s, Kurlansky
recalls a time when squatters were so prominent in this area they
took over a whole park and hookers walked 10th Street in the
daytime. He left in 1977 and came back 15 years later to a
different city.

"It was unbelievable how Koch had changed things," he says now,
referring to three-term ex-mayor Ed Koch, who is credited with
steering the city out of bankruptcy in the late '70s, but couldn't
put a stop to the almost 2000 murders that took place every year
back then. When mayor Giuliani dragged the city out of the war zone
Koch had let fester, the transformation of New York from Bad Apple
to Theme Park Apple was complete.

Although these changes are part of what drove Kurlansky out of
the neighbourhood in the first place, they also brought him back -
chasing the fumes of its one-time leftist bohemia. That's when he
began toying with the idea for this novel. Food played a part,
too.

"Yonah Schimmel's knishes are the densest matter known to
science," says Kurlansky, referring to the famous product of a
nearby Jewish deli, where, for a few dollars, one can purchase a
hot potato or spinach-filled pastry, slather it in hot mustard, and
slip through a gastro wormhole into an Isaac Singer story.

Although there was no particular madeleine that set Kurlansky on
this trip down memory lane, food in general has always inspired
him. "What can I say? I think food is very important to how we live
as people and as families."

Kurlansky grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, attended college in
Indiana, and began writing and putting on plays in the '70s in New
York.

You get the sense that his odd jobs were more important to
making him a writer than any of these experiences. He once, for
instance, worked as a professional chef in New England. He also did
time as a pastry maker. "It's true that writing and pastry making
are similar, but when you work as a pastry chef," says Kurlansky,
"you can get a kind of mania that everything you see is related to
pastries."

Not surprisingly then, almost as important in Boogaloo on
2nd Avenue as the characters are the food items - how they are
presented, where they are consumed and with whom.

Karoline, a German pastry maker who is Nathan's forbidden love
interest, tempts him beyond his marital vows with a body redolent
of butter, and Kurlansky gives them a love scene that sounds like a
recipe for chocolate cake. I make a joke about guilty pleasures and
he comes back knowingly: "Well, there's a reason why we associate
chocolate with sin."

As if this book did not have enough ingredients, there is
one more essential component to its unique flavour: boogaloo music.
A cross between rhythm and blues and Cuban son montuno,
the tunes run through the novel like a soundtrack. In addition to
helping out friends and tenants, Nathan's father has got an idea to
bring boogaloo back to the prominence it had in the late '60s by
resurrecting the career of the nearly forgotten Chow Mein Vega.

Music, immigrant life, the city: Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue
is unusually well-stuffed for a novel of the 21st century. Unlike
fellow New Yorker (and one-time reporter) Tom Wolfe, Kurlansky is
not going to announce a neo-realist charge of the literary citadel,
but he does admit a certain 19th-century "muchness" and interest in
society is missing from American fiction today.

"Let's face it, the 19th century really was the great age of the
novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really
admire."

Though he does not profess to share their talent, Kurlansky does
share their Victorian-era level of production. Since 1992, he has
published a book about the Caribbean, a study of the Basque
country, a short-story collection, a children's book, an anthology
of food writing and histories of European Jewry and America in the
year 1968, not to mention the food histories Cod and
Salt.

On his plate now is a translation of a Zola novel, a book on
non-violence, and a book on New York oysters. I ask Kurlansky if he
ever sleeps. He gives his face a weary stroke and says, "I get up
very early and write a lot."

Though some of his urge to produce comes from the birth of his
first daughter, the 56-year-old seems genuinely, deeply curious
about the world. He is also committed to the idea that by seeing,
sampling, and tasting, people can in fact talk to one another
across cultural barriers.

Kurlansky recalls the time he brought a boogaloo tape on
vacation with him in Brittany. "I was with some friends at this
farm house and they had this boom box. So I put on the tape and
slowly these French farmers came over and began moving to it,
dancing, even."

It's hard not to imagine that this noisy little book will have a
similar effect wherever it is played, tasted, or consumed.

MARK KURLANSKY1948 Born, Connecticut.1960s Studies theatre at Butler University,
Indianapolis.1974 Works in Spain as a journalist.1992 Publishes his first book, A
Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny.1994The Chosen Few: The Resurrection of
European Jewry.1997 International success with Cod: A
Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. Wins Glenfiddich
Best Food Book Award.1999 The Basque History of the
World.2000 Publishes first fiction collection, The
White Man in the Tree And Other Stories.2002 Salt: A World History.2002 Edits Choice Cuts: A Savory
Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout
History.20031968: The Year That Rocked the
World.2005 First novel. Boogaloo on Second Avenue: A
Novel of Pastry, Guilt and Music.

John Freeman is a New York writer. Boogaloo on 2nd
Avenue is published by Jonathan Cape at $55. Mark Kurlansky
will be a guest at next week's Sydney Writers'
Festival.